218516 - Don't List Links Opened As Background Tabs As Visited Until Viewed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Places, enhancement)

Description

[Neil Wehneman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Any link that is opened as a background tab is immeidately listed as visited. 
This "visited" status is sometimes at odds with the user's experience (i.e. they
shut down the browser before all of the tabs have been viewed)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Go to a site such as Slashdot.
2.  Open numerous articles / links as background tabs
3.  Close some or all of the background tabs before viewing them

Actual Results:  
All links that were opened as background tabs (even those not yet actively
viewed by the user) are now listed as visited

Expected Results:  
I believe that it would be helpful to include as a preference the following:

If a link is opened in a background tab, don't consider said link as "visited"
until the background tab has been viewed.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

-> Browser - Tabbed Browser (needs backend changes before the tab handling).

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

visited means that the client loaded the URL and this is true.

I suggest wontfix

Comment 3

[Neil Wehneman]

I would say that your definition of whether a URL has been visited should be
reconsidered because tabs have been introduced.

Has Mozilla visited the URL even though it was only loaded in a background tab?
 Yes.

Has THE USER visited the URL even though it was only loaded in a background tab?
Some would say "Not yet."

My recommendation would be to have the default behavior stick with what's
currently being done, but it would be very useful from a user perspective to be
able to not mark links as visited until they've been actively viewed by the user.

I agree with your implicit statement that the current behavior is not a bug. 
That's why I submitted it as a "Severity: Enhancement" :).

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The same argument applies to windows.  Has the user visited a site loaded in a
new window just because the new window has been opened?  No -- the user may not
even have looked at it... (esp. if the window came up in the background, as is
possible).

Comment 5

[Neil Wehneman]

You have an excellent point in that a similar situation is attainable pre-tabs,
so to speak.

However, almost everyday I get home from work, load up twenty background tabs to
read the day's Slashdot / Linux Today stories and begin to read over dinner.  I
would never do this with twenty "background" windows.

If the browser gets shut down for whatever reason (and it does happen on
occasion) before I've read all the stories, the fact that they are flagged as
visited becomes useless to me, because it does not correlate with my actual
experience of reading them or not!

The ability to use tabs has changed my behavior as a user and I would believe
that the tracking of what's been visited or not should evolve to match this.

My main point in this is that adding this feature will allow the software to
more accurately present the information (specifically, what has been visited and
what hasn't) based on the ACTUAL USER EXPERIENCE, and not a technicality that
the information has been retrieved by the browser.  With more users loading
numerous pages in the background to be queued for reading (thanks to the utility
of tabs) the visitation tracking should evolve to match this new behavior.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Agreed, there.  So the question is how visited checking can be rearchitected
accordingly... right now it uses the global history, and I think we _do_ want to
add pages to global history even if the user has not ever looked at that tab....

Comment 7

[Neil Wehneman]

My suggestion, from a non-developer standpoint...

Within the Options / Preferences area, have two radio buttons allowing the user
to choose whether to consider a link visited based on a tab being opened or the
tab being viewed.  Have these radio buttons directly beneath the option to load
tab in the background.

Since the default behavior of Mozilla is to open tabs in the foreground, have
said radio buttons grayed out by default (after all, if you open a tab in the
foreground you view it at the same time as the browser grabs it.)  If the user
decides to be like me and open tabs in the background, then the radio buttons
become changeable and the user can choose to either have visitation be
considered on-load or on-view.

I leave it to the developers (because it's beyond my skill!) to decide whether
the default should be on-load or on-view, and how to implement all of this in
the code.

Comment 8

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I think the additional utility of doing this is not worth the amount of work
that would be required.  In particular, I think I prefer the current way to
what's proposed -- it (assuming we update links correctly when opened) allows
the user to see which links have been opened in other tabs and which haven't.

Comment 9

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Comment 6 was about how to implement this in the code if we decide to do it. 
Basically, a serious rewrite of one or both of the following would be needed:

1) How we decide whether a link is visited
2) How history works

The former is likely to have a noticeable performance impact, actually...

Comment 10

[Neil Wehneman]

Since I'm not a developer, I would not fault you for delaying / deep-sixing this
for technical reasons.  I'd love to see the feature added, but since I'm not the
one with the skill to implement it, I promise not to whine if it is delayed /
deep-sixed.

Comment 11

[Philip Chee]

WONTFIX based on comment 8 and comment 9.
Moving to Toolkit::Places as recommended by KaiRo